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Hyperion’s Strauss Lieder series is fast becoming a worthy successor to the seminal Schubert and Schumann Lieder sets on the label. In this third volume, the wonderful young British tenor Andrew Kennedy performs a range of songs, from favourites such ...» More

I bear my love In silent bliss About with me In heart and mind. Yes, that I have found you, Sweet child, Will cheer me all My allotted days.

Though the sky be dim, And the night pitch-black, My love shines brightly In golden splendour. And though the world lies and sins, And it hurts to see it so— The bad world must be blinded By your snowy innocence.

English: Richard Stokes

Ich trage meine Minne begins modestly, almost like a folksong, barely straying from the home key of G flat, with a tiny rest before the word ‘stumm’ and the shiest of smiles in the inflection of ‘Du liebes Kind’. By contrast the second verse is more dramatic, with stronger rhythms and chromatic harmonies highlighting the contrast between dark and light, vice and innocence. Having reached a dramatic climax on ‘deiner Unschuld Schnee’ the piano leads the singer gently back to a reprise of the first verse, as if to make up for having inadvertently revealed the passionate breast that lurks beneath his diffident exterior.

I walked along the lonely road, As I’m wont to do each day alone. The heath is silent, not a soul in the fields, Merely the wind in the hedge before me. The road stretches far ahead. My heart yearned for you, you alone. And were you to come, it would be a miracle, I should bow down before you: I love you. And a single glance from you as we met Would be my life’s happiest moment. And were you to gaze at me coldly, I’d defy you, my girl: I love you. But if your lovely eyes smile in welcome, Like a sun in my dark night, I should quickly embrace your sweet heart And gently whisper: I love you.

English: Richard Stokes

Sehnsucht is very different from what one normally associates with Strauss Lieder, especially of this period, seeming almost to anticipate the early songs of Alban Berg. Beginning as a bleak, melancholy reverie, the song gradually increases in momentum as the lover warms to his theme, until he imagines his beloved actually standing before him. At this point the piano overflows in a completely new figure that is taken up by the singer in near-delirium, with voice and piano continuing to answer each other to a dramatic climax, until the vision begins to fade at the final ‘Ich liebe dich’. Returned to the desolation of the opening, it is left to the piano, high in the treble, to offer just a lingering echo of the dream.

This was the first time that Strauss set a poem by Detlev von Liliencron, one of the same group of literary radicals that included John Henry Mackay and Karl Henckell. A remarkable figure, Liliencron was a Prussian army officer of noble birth who only after some years of hunting and soldiering discovered a gift for vivid and realistic poetry. He was revered by his peers who included both Busse and Dehmel. Strauss returned to his poetry with Glückes genug and Ich liebe dich.

Hail to the day that you were born, Hail to the day that I first saw you! Lost in the brilliance of your eyes, I stand before you, a blissful dreamer.

I seem to see heaven, which I’d only sensed From afar, suddenly open, And I am permitted to see a sun That my desire had only let me surmise.

How lovely my reflection in your eyes! And in your eyes how great my happiness! And beseechingly I cry to Fate: O tarry, tarry, and never change!

English: Richard Stokes

The heightened lyricism of this setting—heightened in every sense, as it spends most of its time near or at the top of the stave—looks forward to Strauss’s operatic writing for tenor. The heroic pitch of the opening suits the idealized rhetoric of the first stanza, with its repetition of ‘Heil’, while a dramatic sidestep to D major at ‘ein sel’ger Träumer da’ prepares a rising sequence of key shifts and pianissimo markings that builds to a climactic return of the opening melody on ‘Wie schön mein Bild’. In keeping with the sentiment, this is pitched a third higher, in E major, and the tonality continues to oscillate between sharps and flats—the first ‘weile’ being in D, the second in D flat—on its way to the final cadence. Norman Del Mar, in his masterly book on Strauss, notes a striking resemblance between the piano postlude and Gretchen’s music in Liszt’s Faust Symphony, suggesting that Strauss was aware of the crucial lines from Goethe’s Faust, which Henckell’s final couplet seems to echo:

Werd’ ich zum Augenblicke sagen „Verweile doch, du bist so schön!“

Could I but say to the passing moment: ‘Ah still delay, thou art so fair!’

O sweet May, O have mercy, O sweet May, I beseech you fervently: I see the fields grow warm at your breast, And everything teems beneath your spell. You who are so endlessly gentle and gracious, O beloved May, bestow on me your gifts!

The gloomy pilgrim, who in this region Escaped the icy breath of wintertime, Chose a girl as sweet to see as you, As fresh as Spring like you in chaste splendour. We love each other in love’s embrace, Have mercy, lovely blessed May, have mercy!

English: Richard Stokes

For this song Strauss moves to the sharp key of A major, traditionally associated in Lieder vocabulary with nature, springtime and indeed the month of May. (For examples see Schubert’s Das Lied im Grünen or Schumann’s Im wunderschönen Monat Mai, not to mention Strauss’s own Das Rosenband.) The would-be lover struggling with the urgings of nature is here pictured with affectionate humour, backed by a sunlit torrent of semiquavers and a sequence of chromatic surges that could have come from the pen of no other composer.

The moonlight has already faded, Dark night has crept up on us; O noble dawn, arise, I place all my trust in you.

Phoebus, its beauteous herald, Has already harnessed his chariot, The sun’s steeds are between the shafts, And Phoebus holds the reins.

Its herald, Lord Lucifer, Is already hovering up in heaven, He has opened up the clouds And sprinkled the earth with his dew.

Oh pass right by her little bedchamber, Gently wake my sweetest love; Deliver her this message from me: My homage, my greeting and a good day.

Yet you must wake her most chastely, And so reveal my secret love; Must tell her how her servant watches So full of grief the whole night through.

Look at her flaxen hair for me, Her bare little neck, her bright little eyes, Kiss for me her red lips, And, if she permits, her round little breasts.

English: Richard Stokes

An example of Strauss choosing to end a group in lighter vein, Himmelsboten sets a poem from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, the anthology of German folk-poetry assembled by Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim. Unlike his contemporary Gustav Mahler, whose obsession with the Wunderhorn poems led him not only to compose many songs but also to base entire symphonies on them, Strauss had surprisingly little recourse to the collection. And yet when he did try his hand, his skill at depicting character came triumphantly to the fore, as in this delightful aubade. All the background details are wittily sketched in—the creeping departure of night, the hoof-beats of Phoebus’s steeds pawing the ground, the twinkling morning star and a delicate shower of dew. As for the young lover, like Schubert’s young miller-lad he combines ardour with a charming diffidence—the three little bows at ‘Mein Dienst, mein Gruß, ein’ guten Tag’ would be obvious even without Strauss’s stage direction at this point. There is real warmth in the final verse where he first savours the thought of her lips with a prolonged trill in the piano part and then—having asked permission—lingeringly traces the outlines of her ‘Brüstlein rund’. Given that few songs in the Lieder repertoire can match this combination of visual imagery, tenderness and humour, it is a mystery that this one is not at the top of every singer’s list.